Three Essays in Agricultural Insurance

Download or read book Three Essays in Agricultural Insurance written by Xianglin Liu and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 87 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this dissertation, I present three essays studying agricultural insurance in both developing and developed countries. Farmers face numerous risks including production, price, financial, etc. In response, farmers may seek agricultural insurance to cover some of these risks. Different questions of rainfall insurance and crop insurance are considered in this dissertation, and natural experiment and Propensity Score Matching method are applied in measuring the impact a “treatment” on insurance participation rates for farmers. Chapter 1 is an extensive review of China’s agricultural insurance market. I first summarize the history of the market for agricultural insurance in China, which between 2007 and 2013 grew an average of 30% annually and is now the second largest market in the world. I then review major agricultural insurance programs introduced by the Chinese government during this period. I also identify the major challenges that have to be overcome to further develop agricultural insurance in China, and discuss reforms that have been proposed to address them. In Chapter 2, I estimate farmers’ willingness to pay (WTP) for a hypothetical rainfall index insurance product, with a special interest in whether recent experience with a natural disaster increases the WTP. My findings are based on a survey of small farm households in China’s Heilongjiang Province, which suffered a large flood in the summer of 2013. I find a significantly higher propensity to purchase rainfall index insurance for farmers who experienced the flood in 2013 than farmers who did not. I also find a much higher WTP for rainfall index insurance for farmers affected by the flood. My findings imply that past experience in major disasters could alter farmers’ risk perception and lead to a higher demand for risk management tools such as crop insurance. In Chapter 3, I examine whether U.S. farmers using fixed-cash lease are more likely to purchase federal crop insurance (FCI). Farmland rental lease choice plays a significant role in farm management decision making. Fixed-cash agreement has become the most widely used leasing contract in the United States, despite the fact that it is riskier than other types of farmland leasing contracts. A propensity score matching method is used to compare FCI participation rate between farmers under fixed-cash rental contract and farmers under other types of leasing arrangement. By analyzing a farm-level national survey data, the results show that using fixed-cash rental agreement significantly increases FCI participation rate, providing evidence that FCI is adopted by farmers as an effective risk management tool to reduce production risks.